Skip to content

Massive Open Online Courses

Australian Software Factory Attendees Share their Experiences

Last Australian summer (December – February 2015), we launched the Australian Software Factory (ASF) with a small number of dedicated students who participated in the ASF for earning work experience towards their degree program. All of them were enrolled in the Bachelor of Engineering in Software, BE (Software) degree program at the University of Adelaide, Australia. The students successfully completed their internship in the ASF while working on 3 very interesting projects with one project was having clients based in Ireland. The ASF was mainly supervised by my colleagues, Dr. Padraig O’leary, who played a pivotal role in making the implementation of ASF a reality by volunteering to provide projects for the first offerings of the ASF and supervise over the summer break. We were glad that the ASF was able to provide the participants with the value they were expecting in terms of hands on training and knowledge about working on real projects using state-of-the-art software development methods and technologies. Now we are assessing the viability of running the ASF again. Our students participants are the most important source of feedback and input about the value of the ASF and feedback for improvements. We are glad and satisfied with the feedback we have received. I would like to share some of the comments from a few students through these pages to encourage other institutes to take similar initiatives. Read More »Australian Software Factory Attendees Share their Experiences

Research Methods for Software Engineering Students

The Software Engineering community is increasingly recognising the value of empirical evidence to support research and practice. Empirical evidence provides a means to evaluate the utility of promising research areas and to help practitioners to make informed technology adoption decisions. Hence, there is an increasing need for providing software engineering researchers and practitioners with appropriate knowledge and training in different methods and techniques to design, execute, analyze, and report empirical research. Software Engineering degree programs (both undergraduate and postgraduate) are expected to have high quality courses on Research Methods for imparting appropriate knowledge and skills of designing, connecting, analysing, and reporting empirical studies. There are an increasing number of books and articles on research methods, however, many Software Engineering degree programs appear to find it difficult to come up with a high quality course that can impart the knowledge, understanding, and skills of carrying out both quantitive and qualitative research a wide variety of topics in Software Engineering. Based on several tutorials We are also working on designing and running a course on research methods for our Software Engineering students. Read More »Research Methods for Software Engineering Students

A New Course for BE (Software) Degree – Engineering Software as a Service

Software Engineers are expected to develop and evolve increasingly complex systems and services using Agile and Lean approaches and emerging technologies like Cloud computing. Hence, there ought to be modernisation of the curricula and mode of delivery for educating and mentoring the future Software Engineers. Software as a Service paradigm has been increasing popular as more are more applications are being developed for mobile and Tablet devices. As part of the restricting the Bachelor of Engineering (Software) degree program at the University of Adelaide, I have designed a new course, Engineering Software as Services, based on a very popular book, Engineering Software As A Service, by Armando Fox and David Patterson. Both of them have also developed a very popular Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) delivered through edX. They also offer a Small Private Online Course (SPOC) for different institutes who are interested in using their book and courseware. I have got a SPOC set up for our course whose brief description and the key objectives are provided here for sharing.Read More »A New Course for BE (Software) Degree – Engineering Software as a Service

Australian Software Factory Becomes Operational

With great pleasure and sense of satisfaction, I like to share the news that the Australian Software Factory (ASF) became operational in the School of Computer Science, the University of Adelaide from December 2015. The idea was conceived with the vision of enabling talented software development students to gain the knowledge and experience of applying industrial strengthen software development methods, processes, and tools on real life software development projects for enhancing their productivity and employability. We selected seven highly energetic and committed students to join the Australian Software Factory this year – six students are participating in the ASF for fulfilling the requirements of their Bachelor of Software Engineering degree work experience and one of them is a summer internship student. Unfortunately, we had to decline a few very good International students because of some procedural and legal ambiguities, however, we are trying to get the ambiguous points clarified. A brief description of the goals, and logistics of the ASF has been provided below:Read More »Australian Software Factory Becomes Operational